Violet – Hole
On Sunday night, I rewatched Bridesmaids, and I don’t know, it’s so far from being a perfect movie, and yet I love it so much. If anything, I loved it even more the second time around. Maybe this is because on first viewing, I was simply thrilled to be watching a comedy that didn’t rely on men to make jokes while a theatre full of men and women laughed right along with me.
This time, watching in solitude rather than in a theatre, I experienced a much deeper connection to the story as a whole, and to Kristen Wiig’s character in particular. It’s really fucking hard to be friends with other women, but it’s also not my fault, as a woman, that this is true. It’s no one person’s fault, really. It’s simply what happens when girls are steeped in pop culture that says no woman can ever be happy without that one, true BFF who will always be there, no matter how shitty things get.
We grow up with an expectation, not dissimilar to equally pop culture driven expectation that there will be one, true Man who will make everything bad in our lives disappear, and then we grow up, to varying degrees, and with varying success, and we’re inevitably shattered to find out that we’re on our own; that the same pop culture that taught us to expect that friend is the pop culture that taught us not to trust other women, that set us up to fail at being whole and complete because it also taught us not to trust our intuitive conceptions of what whole and complete might be. Basically, we’ve been given three seconds to get back to our seat, but since no one can’t get anywhere in three seconds, we’ve been set up to fail.
And in the meantime, we continue to be bombarded with repetitions of that original lie, and we continue to look for that magical unicorn of a BFF, until one day we break down in a puddle of loneliness and shame at being such miserable failures because surely it’s our fault, and the reason we can’t make that deep and meaningful connection is due to our failure to be real, adult women.
I don’t know where I’m going with this, since I’ve lost and found my train of thought approximately ten times already, but I think what I want to say is that for all it’s shortcomings, Bridesmaids is a tremendous movie when it comes to talking about the reality of friendship between women, and about the terrifying loneliness that inevitably accompanies any change, good or bad.
I also decided to, ahem, procure the soundtrack, and now I’m listening to music that I’m pretty sure my parents were listening to back in the early 90s, and I can’t get enough.
This great friend of mine nails it. (Bolding mine.)
Thanks for this. I think we all feel this way a lot and are scared to admit it - that the reason we don’t look like every buddy comedy is because we, personally, are flawed, as opposed to the unrealistic relationship expectations we see all around us.
2 months ago